Hegel on Hamann

G. W. F. Hegel

Publication Year: 2011

In 1828, G. W. F. Hegel published a critical review of Johann George Hamann, a retrospective of the life and works of one of Germany's most enigmatic and challenging thinkers and writers. While Hegel's review had enjoyed a central place in Hamann studies since its appearance, Hegel on Hamann is the first English translation of the important work. Philosophers, theologians, and literary critics welcome Anderson's stunning translation since Hamann is gaining renewed attention, not only as a key figure of German intellectual history, but also as an early forerunner of postmodern thought. Relationships between Enlightenment, Counter Enlightenment, and Idealism come to the fore as Hegel reflects on Hamann's critiques of his contemporaries Immanuel Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, J. G. Herder, and F. H. Jacobi. Hegel on Hamann also includes an introduction to Hegel's review, as well as an essay on the role of friendship in Hamann's life, in Hegel's thought, and in German intellectual culture more broadly. Rounding out the volume are its extensive annotations and bibliography, which facilitate further study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy in English and German. This book is essential both for readers of Hegel or Hamann and for those interested in the history of German thought, the philosophy of religion, language and hermeneutics, or friendship as a philosophical category.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

Contents

Note on the Text

G. W. F. Hegel’s essay “Hamanns Schriften” (“The Writings of Hamann”)
originally appeared in the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik (Yearbooks
for Scientific Criticism) in October and December 1828, nos. 77–80 and 107–
14. It was a review of J. G. Hamann’s collected works, which had appeared
under the editorship of Friedrich Roth in 1821–25. The review includes...

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the faculty and administration of Duke University and
Hunter College, City University of New York, for affording me the time
and flexibility to complete this book, and to my colleagues in German at
both institutions for their feedback and encouragement as its ideas developed
and crystallized. For sparking my initial interest in Hamann and...

Introduction

Johann Georg Hamann died in 1788, two months shy of his fifty-eighth
birthday. It would be another thirty-three years before his collected
works began to appear, under the editorship of Friedrich Roth.1 Once
all of Hamann’s writings had come out, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
published a review of them in the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik
(Yearbooks for Scientific Criticism), discussing at length, among other things...

The Notion of Friendship in Hegel and Hamann

In her book Johann Georg Hamann’s Relational Metacriticism, Gwen Griffith
Dickson suggests that “the key to understanding Hamann’s approach to”
“language, knowledge, and anthropology” “can be found in the idea of
the relationship,” both “the first and foundational . . . human-divine relationship
that . . . grounds all being, knowledge and language” and “the relations
of one human being to another” which...

The Writings of Hamann by G. W. F. Hegel

The public is most greatly indebted to the esteemed editor for the fact
that he now, through his promotion and perseverance, delivers into our
hands the writings of Hamann, previously accessible in their entirety only
to a few and with great difficulty, and after so many prospects of their
complete reprinting had fallen through. Hamann himself did not give
satisfaction (R 1:x, prologue) to various invitations to organize a collection...

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